Alva Vanderbilt Belmont

Sylvia D. Hoffert

Description

Absorbing biography of a wealthy and strong-willed feminist

Read an IU Press blog interview with the author

A New York socialite and feminist, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont was known to be domineering, temperamental, and opinionated. Her resolve to get her own way regardless of the consequences stood her in good stead when she joined the American woman suffrage movement in 1909. Thereafter, she used her wealth, her administrative expertise, and her social celebrity to help convince Congress to pass the 19th Amendment and then to persuade the exhausted leaders of the National Woman's Party to initiate a world wide equal rights campaign. Sylvia D. Hoffert argues that Belmont was a feminist visionary and that her financial support was crucial to the success of the suffrage and equal rights movements. She also shows how Belmont's activism, and the money she used to support it, enriches our understanding of the personal dynamics of the American woman's rights movement. Her analysis of Belmont's memoirs illustrates how Belmont went about the complex and collaborative process of creating her public self.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. An Impossible Child
2. Every Inch a General
3. A Sex Battle
4. Immortalizing the Lady in Affecting Prose
5. Belmont's Orphan Child
6. The Last Word
Postscript: My Turn
Appendix: Belmont's Financial Contributions to Woman's Rights
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Charities
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Women
• Charity
• Charitable organization
• Woman
• Philantropy
• The Women

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 23 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005601
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ALVA VANDERBILT BELMONT

ALVA VANDERBILT BELMONT
Unlikely Champion of Women s Rights

SYLVIA D. HOFFERT
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
2012 by Sylvia D. Hoffert
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoffert, Sylvia D.
Alva Vanderbilt Belmont : unlikely champion of women s rights / Sylvia D. Hoffert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35661-1 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00560-1
(electronic book)
1. Belmont, Alva, 1853-1933. 2. Belmont, Alva, 1853-1933-Political and social views. 3. Feminists-United States-Biography. 4. Suffragists-United States-Biography. 5. Women political activists-United States-Biography. 6. Women-Suffrage-United States-History-20th century. 7. Womn s rights-United States-History-20th century. 8. Socialites-New York (State)-New York-Biography. 9. Rich people-New York (State)-New York-Biography. I. Title.
HQ1413.B44H64 2012
305.42092-dc23
[B]
2011024056
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 An Impossible Child
2 Every Inch a General
3 A Sex Battle
4 Immortalizing the Lady in Affecting Prose
5 Belmont s Orphan Child
6 The Last Word
Postscript: My Turn
Appendix: Belmont s Financial Contributions to Woman s Rights
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a Pleasure to thank those without whose help this book would never have been written and published. Like feminist reform movements, no book project can flourish without financial support. I would like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A M University, the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A M University, the History Department at Texas A M University, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, for theirs. Laura Micheletti Puaca and Art Lindeman provided invaluable help as my research assistants in the early stages of this project. I am deeply indebted to Sarah Hutcheon and the archivists at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University for their assistance in accessing the documents in their collections. Paul Miller and John Tschirch of the Preservation Society of Newport County in Rhode Island and the archivists in the Special Collections Library at Duke University were both welcoming and helpful. My thanks also goes to Nancy Cott for inviting me to participate in the 2007 Schlesinger Library Summer Seminar in Gender History, Writing Past Lives: Biography as History, and to the participants who provided thoughtful critiques of an early draft of one of my chapters. Peter Filene, my former colleague at UNC, read the entire manuscript in one of its earlier versions and provided invaluable help in revising it. Rebecca Schloss, Kate Engel, Cynthia Bouton, and April Hatfield read and commented upon all of my chapters. Ruth Crocker, Robyn Muncy, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Kathleen McCarthy, Nancy Robertson, Wendy Gamber, and Theda Perdue offered me encouragement when I was much in need of it. Leon Fink, editor of Labor , graciously gave me permission to republish material taken from my article Private Secretaries in Early Twentieth-Century America. The Huntington Library, the Schlesinger Library, the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library, the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library at Duke, and the Preservation Society of Newport County gave me permission to quote from their documents. I am grateful to Bob Sloan, his staff, and the readers at Indiana University Press for their help. And finally, I thank my family, whose love and support have nurtured and sustained me for so many years.
Sylvia D. Hoffert Chapel Hill, North Carolina
INTRODUCTION
Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, a wealthy New York socialite and militant woman s rights advocate, was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1853. But it took a lifetime for her to become what she was. The process of self-making that she engaged in was a complex and collaborative one that took place in constantly changing contexts. The stories she told about herself reflected that reality. As literary scholar John Paul Eakin has pointed out, such stories are a product of our ability to imaginatively use historical fact, memory, and circumstance to respond to our particular needs in a specific moment in time. 1 Thus, Belmont s understanding of herself was always fragmentary and to some degree fictive.
The story she told about herself and the stories others told about her are compelling and dramatic. Among other things, she married a millionaire, divorced him, and married a second. She forced her daughter to marry the most eligible aristocrat in Europe. After her second husband s death, she embraced the cause of woman s rights and then joined the National Woman s Party (NWP), which represented the most militant wing of the movement. It was largely her money that paid for both its suffrage and equal rights campaigns. She was not its only donor but she was certainly its most generous one.
The sources that document who she was and what she did provide the opportunity to explore the ways that lives are constructed and to relate that process of construction to the writing of autobiography and biography. Because self-making is rarely transparent, it presents a challenge to biographers, demanding that they work with layers of narrative texts created by a great number of people telling their stories in widely divergent contexts and at various periods in time. Biographers must deal with what their subjects say about themselves as well as what others said of them. From those sources, biographers must shape their own narrative, one that arises not only from their research and life experiences but also from the personal relationships that they have formed with the people they are writing about. 2 In that sense, all biographies are in part autobiographies. Or as literary critic Paul Murray Kendall put it, On the trail of another the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn. 3
Belmont s financial support was crucial to the success of the suffrage and equal rights movements. But her contributions, like those of many philanthropists, came with strings attached. The result is that Belmont s story complicates our understanding of the interpersonal dynamics that characterized the American woman s rights movement in the early twentieth century and the strategic choices that militant feminists made as they carried out their various campaigns.
It was Belmont s financial support of the NWP that initially piqued my interest in her. Why, I asked, would a socially prominent, immensely wealthy woman in her mid-fifties, who had a vested interest in preserving the status quo and had shown no previous concern about the obvious social, economic, and political inequities that plagued the United States in the early twentieth century, suddenly become a feminist? Why did she donate money to the most militant wing of the woman s rights movement? And what were the consequences when she did?
Belmont was strong-willed, domineering, and determined to be the center of attention. What impact, I wondered, might identifying the tensions that resulted from her presence, how they manifested themselves, and the strategies that were used to resolve them have on our understanding and assessment of the woman s rights movement? And how might the master narrative of early twentieth-century feminism in America change if we placed at its center the story of someone who felt that she was bearing most of the burden for providing its leaders with enough financial support to carry out campaigns to promote suffrage and then equal rights?
In order to answer these questions, I structure my narrative of the life of Alva Belmont around an analysis of documents such as memoirs that are explicitly autobiographical as well as those with autobiographical dimensions such as court records, letters, and interviews written or dictated by those who, through their relationships with Belmont, participated in her self-making enterprise. 4 So this is as much a book about those who helped to make Belmont as it is about how Belmont made herself. Structuring my narrative in this manner allows me to highlight the complexity of her relationships with those who had the most influence on the way she portrayed herself. It also allows me to reflect upon the way in which the processes of self-making and the autobiographical documents describing those processes influence the writing of biography.
From the time she married in 1875, Belmont quite self-consciously attempted to position herself as a woman whose life was worthy of public notice. As Jo Burr Margadant has pointed out, no one invents a self apart from cultural notions available to them in a